Well, well - it seems we have hot water in the office kitchen at last! Only taken about six months, but the landlords finally had enough and got a plumber in. The disappointing thing is that a) they are a buildin9 company (www.orchard-homes.co.uk) - don't buy a new house from these people, the walls are made of cardboard and things pack up after six months) and b) they have only fixed the water because people repeatedly complained, and not because it didn't work. Now only soap in the toilets and the lift to fix…
D is out with Jo again today and they have meetings with Fareham and Gosport Councils to talk about Visitor Guides and tourism products, leaving me in the office to sort out the Southampton books. Lots of complicated politics going on. We include in the Visitors Guide a definitive list of accommodation providers in the city, most of whom pay well to advertise their service. BUT we can only include those who are registered with the Coouncil and have received the appropriate gradings. One of the biggest private hotels in the city (the owner also runs three self-catering apartments and a row of shops) simply WILL NOT get his premises registered and refuses to co-operate with the council for his own reasons. Therefore, we have left him out of the Visitor Guide and he's furious, becasue he is prepared to pay quite a lot of money for a full page ad. Thankfully i don't generally have to deal with this and its more D's role, but this kind of thing seems to happen all the time. other people seem to have got the idea that we (walking distance) are actually the people who carry out the inspections???
Ho hum. There are some very stupid, ignorant people out there.
Anyway, their abscence means I can really crack on with laying up the guides and looking in more detail at the London project, as well as get into some of the CDs I picked up at the weekend. Norway's "Biosphere" are apparently well known in the ambient soundscape genre, and I can see why. Substrata is really beautiful, deep electronica with minimal rhythms and echoes that paint a vivid picture of the Arctic landscape around Tromso. Unfortunately, the Macs here don't have nearly adequate sound reproduction and some of the deepest, echoing bass is lost. It is a hypnotic album tho, and perhaps not best suited to a work environment. I keep drifting off into it.
Mind you, that's me and music generally - I can't concentrate on much else when I have a new album on of any kind!

Picked up our first consignment of bricks last night from Joyce and Tony - who had forgotten we'd arranged for me to call round. They had about 50, so now our collection is up to - er, 51! I think by Easter if we start to scrounge a bit more we might have enought to make a start on the garden wall.
Good to catch up with them tho, we kind of pass by between services and stuff, never really catching up. Excellent cake from Joyce's 50th birthday last week, and she kindly gave me an Advent calendar for the kids.